Although jazz listeners may not agree on which music and musicians qualify as jazz, at a basic level, you can identify jazz by a few distinguishing traits: swing and syncopation, improvisation, bent notes[more…]

When you start getting a rush from jazz improvisers' rhythms, harmonies, and melodies, you know you're on the road to true jazz appreciation. To truly appreciate jazz, you need to identify each part[more…]

It's no secret that most operas are not written in English, which gives opera in general a reputation for being boring. To a certain extent, that reputation is earned: If you can't understand what's going[more…]

Although jazz is performed by musicians of many colors and mixes elements of many kinds of music, it's essentially African-American music. Interwoven with jazz's history is the history of the black experience[more…]

Whether you bought a piano or an electric keyboard, the first thing to do when you get your new baby home is to find a spot for it to live. This spot doesn't have to be a permanent resting place — pianos[more…]

The bright colors and shocking contrasts of Paul Gauguin's paintings have amazed and perplexed artists and art lovers for over a century, and the story behind Gauguin's life and style is as interesting[more…]

The concept of using dynamic markings (which indicate the relative loudness of different sections in the music) in sheet music came about around the same time as the piano — for good reason. Before the[more…]

Before the advent of the drum set, drums were played one at a time. Each drummer played one drum, and in order to make bigger and better noise — er, music — more drummers were needed. Then somewhere along[more…]

The most interesting periods of music are those at the turning point from one accepted musical style to the next, such as the break from Baroque music to Classical music. These turning points are generally[more…]

Music concrête is a type of music that sprang directly out of the evolution of music technology. As a throwback to classical music being inspired by poetic forms, music concrête has its roots in the 1920s[more…]

It's not surprising that as progressive rock and heavy metal both took off in the 1970s that they would eventually cross over. Bands like Jethro Tull, Kansas, and Rush successfully mixed the muscular guitar[more…]

Before you can audition players for your blues band, you have to find them. You can pass the word around your neighborhood, workplace, or school, but that will net you just so many candidates, and their[more…]

Today, American architects follow standards established by the Secretary of the Interior when preserving architecture. The following definitions for preservation, restoration, reconstruction and replication[more…]

Tuning a guitar to itself using the fifth-fret method is an important and useful guitar skill. The fifth-fret method is the most common type of relative tuning, and it's all you need if you're planning[more…]

Understanding how to read the circle of fifths will help you understand the relation between music's major keys and their relative minor keys. A major key and its relative minor use the same key signature[more…]

Key signatures are important when reading music. You must understand how to read key signatures in order to know how to play the notes the way the composer intended. The key signature is a grouping of[more…]

Understanding music theory means knowing the language of music. The main thing to know about music theory is that it is simply a way to explain the music we hear. Music had existed for thousands of years[more…]

You couldn't read or write music without notes. If you think of music as a language, the notes are like letters of the alphabet. If you know how to recognize the notes, you can learn the language.[more…]

Finding notes on your guitar is not the same as reading notes on sheet music. To understand how to find notes on a guitar, it helps to break up the neck of the guitar to see where all the notes lie.[more…]

Finding the major scales on a guitar is not as hard as you might think. Traditionally, guitarists think of the guitar neck as being broken up into blocks of four frets, and, depending on what key you want[more…]

The harmonic minor scale is a variation of the natural minor scale. Consequently, finding harmonic minor scales on a guitar is similar to finding a natural minor except that it is off by one half step.[more…]